


The Stars above the Forty-Eighth Vestibule in the Northern Halls

by laughingpineapple



Category: Piranesi - Susanna Clarke
Genre: Birds, Classical Statuary, Exploration, Far Future, Gen, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:53:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28266447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/pseuds/laughingpineapple
Summary: Sarah Raphael in a distant future, holding a lantern up against the night.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 27
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	The Stars above the Forty-Eighth Vestibule in the Northern Halls

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hangingfire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hangingfire/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! I hope these Further Sarah Adventures are to your liking!
> 
> Thanks J. for the invaluable support!

**1\. Self-appointed point of no return  
**

On the first hour of the first day of the Years of the Great Journey, Sarah Raphael reached the antechamber between the forty-fifth and sixty-second northern halls, where her statue awaited her. After all the years since she first reached this place, the statue (as statue do) still pushed forward, holding a lantern in the face of the unknown, still alone, out of choice or because no-one else followed.

“That’s how it is, isn’t it” she greeted it with a tired familiarity. Darkness was their one constant companion, in its duality of formless potential and depressing mess. A pitch-black smudge in lieu of the traditional yin-yang. “I know, I know. That’s how it is.”

They stood side by side, shouldering their darkness in the sunlit antechamber, as the waves of the north-eastern tide lapped nearby.

It was here, in this moment, that Sarah Raphael committed to her Great Journey (always capitalized in her mind, as a learned affectation) and to the years that followed, in which she would cross the House’s halls in a straight line until she would find places and statues and thoughts no-one had seen, past the need for maps and numbers, crossing into a vast, blessed, lonely dream of marble and further still, shedding her ties, her history, her name until all of her would be simple and kind.

This was the last shore where she told herself she could still go back and she did not waver. That surprised her, this un-wavering in the face of leaving her world behind, on this last moment where she’d allowed herself to desist and turn back. But then, her statue did not waver either.

Enough of the balance she kept all her life, weaving her days inside and outside the House. The birds called. Seagulls, specifically. Seagulls called. Time to go. If this all was meant for balance, she had weighty years behind her, all her youth before she knew the clarity of these halls. Onward, then, to softer endings.

There was, however, a necessary first step. A step she would take now, at the beginning, before the House’s gentle tides and patterns would mold her to the point that she may cross a threshold and not notice.

On a more practical note: a step she needed to take while her hiking boots were still good and her food rations ample.

So she moved to the West, following the gaze of her statue which she had chosen as her compass, past the statue of an old woman holding a model building, the statue of a hare, the statue of a man drinking from an endless cup, familiar figures welcoming her back and letting her go at once, as she would never come back to the antechamber between the forty-fifth and sixty-second northern halls and they all knew it. As she took her first steps, already her heart longed for the uncharted chambers. To find a broken window and stand in an untrodden courtyard, the absurdity of a living being existing among the cobblestones under the direct rays of this distant sun. Or, closer! Closer, as her first step. Sarah Raphael, glistening in her reflective anorak, white hair sparkling under the morning sun, reached the forty-eighth vestibule and climbed the tall staircase that led to the upper halls, that foreign land of clouds and mists.

**2\. Crossing the Upper Halls**

As she stood atop the staircase, a deep, thick cloud welcomed her in the upper vestibule. She breathed it in. It filled her as well as the room around her. Eventually, the wind carried the cloud through the southern door toward the upper seventy-second northern hall (the layout appeared to hold; the statues, however, were different, always different). Eventually, she breathed out. The small cloud of her breath rejoined the twirling mass to the South. Whether something had changed in her, she could not say.

The upper halls stretched like a sky, walls arching to join in a vaulted ceiling far, far above. The architecture of the House still defied classification.

“There is nothing about the house,” Sarah Raphael recited, feeling the blue come up on her lips like a prayer, “that even remotely resembles 20th century work whether in the style of Post-Modern, Late-Modern, Brutalism, Neo-Expressionism, Wrightian, the New Formalism, Miesian, the International Style, Streamline Moderne, Art Deco...”

There was a time when she could quote up to three columns of that endless list, which she had taken up as a personal mantra of sorts, a comforting reminder of everything this House, too, was not. Still, here, the result, this sum of negatives, was not an absence. New clouds flooded in from the North. A kneeling statue of a muscular woman holding a lute offered her her free hand and Sarah Raphael took it, crawling toward the safety of the line of plinths, letting her hands guide her through the fog as she coasted the circular room and resumed her westward journey.

What follows is an incomplete list of the views Sarah Raphael encountered as she traversed the upper halls, but not a list of statues, which would be too long, even abridged:

  * A fountain, sparkling with clear water which it collected from the rain clouds, carved with figures of freshwater fishes of varying dimensions, in which seven pigeons were bathing

  * A closed gate, its bars made of marble, which could be circumvented by crossing one hall north, then west, then south again to find oneself on the other side, and therefore only signify the idea of a closed gate, a statue of a closed gate, perhaps, not unlike the millions of others that line the halls

  * In a small room filled with statues of sculptors, a portal, looking for all intents and purposes like the one she had come from, reality folding upon itself and raising like the corner of a curtain. Through this fissure in one of its walls, the House gave way to a crowded highway. The cars drove by too fast to ascertain their models and a signal in the distance remained blurred, and the sky bore a heavy shade of blue

  * A stone bridge across a ruined floor. Did the creation of the bridge predate the decay of the floor?

  * With the caveat that this may have been a trick of the eye, as the mind sees things in the ever-shifting masses of the clouds that sit, heavy, on the upper halls’ floors: a prowling figure disappearing into a passageway

  * A more reasonable explanation for the above would be a fleeting sighting of a large bird waddling around, as birds so often make their nests in the spacious upper halls, cuckoos, waxbills, ibises, goshawks, brushfinches, spinetails, warblers, emus, wood owls, dodos, crested shelducks, quails, rails, tits and finches of many kinds, hummingbirds, tanagers, herons, starlings, cranes and swallows all. One could wonder whether the population of birds in the House had grown in numbers in the past decades or whether they always favoured the higher grounds. Should the former hypothesis be found to more closely describe the truth, one could perhaps do well to wonder why

  * A family of moorhens splashed about in a rivulet that would flow downstairs to bring freshwater to the halls below

  * On the fourth morning of this first step of her Great Journey, she was woken up by cockcrow to find a flock of white chickens perched atop the nearby row of statues, propping themselves up on marble hands, hats, flowing capes and looking like so many mounds of soft snow

  * The scattered remains of a centuries-old skeleton, for whom she felt a deep kinship, taking their presence as a sign that humanity has always slipped through the gaps and curiosity has always pushed them further toward the sun. Their bones are now tended to and left to rest under the watchful statue of an elephant nursing her young




She was reaching the thresholds of Matthew Rose Sorensen’s mapped grounds. Numbers swirled and blurred this far away from that “first vestibule” that arbitrarily acted as their center – the one through which they came in, their subjective beginning, but still a point in a mathematical plane. The denomination of the hall below the one she was standing in is two thousand, four hundred and fifty-six West, or two thousand, six hundred and fifteen West, or several options in between, none of which matter in the lest to one who means to leave it behind and never return. What did matter, as a point of curiosity, was that she remembered the hall after this one to be of a peculiar sort: vast, round and empty, echoing the thought that something should be there but when you turned around to look, there was not.

As the ever-shifting mists cleared, she saw past the arched doorway that in the upper halls, the same round walls housed a winding staircase that spiraled up through the faraway ceiling.

Readjusting the length of her carbon fiber hiking sticks for the ascent, Sarah Raphael trembled at the prospect of the open sky.

**3\. The Labyrinth from above**

In the end she climbed the last step and threw her tired body like a sack of potatoes on the immaculate black roof of the House, past the birds and the clouds and the winds. The sun was burned in the middle of the sky, the air still and uncannily clear; the paths, laid by the intersecting lines of the halls and passageways coasting the great courtyards, traced an irregular web that crisscrossed the paved ground as far as the eye could see. There was no haze on the horizon other than the limits of her mind, which could only contain so many paths at once. If she could have taken in the entirety of the horizon, she would have seen the halls merge and divert forever.

This contemplation lasted three hours, during which she blinked once.

Further on her narrow rooftop path, careful not to slide off the arched sides that fell for dozens of metres before cutting away to the courtyards, Sarah Raphael found another hatch. With a round outline and no stairs leading down, this one rather looked fashioned like a well, allowing access to the ample pools of freshwater below. She sat down and tied her ropes to her jug until she could use it to refill her reserve (“the beauty of the House remains immeasurable,” she hummed to herself with immense fondness. “Its kindness as irrefutable as it is infinite”).

The clearest metaphysical sun shone over its eternal landscape and there she was, crumpling the plastic wrapping of her food bar, taking a sip off her plastic jug. Re-tying her left shoe lace, which had come a little loose.

There were, on the rooftop of the House, solitary statues of colossal proportions breaking the skyline, often surrounded by rows of smaller figures, none of which were mirrored by any counterpart below. Taller still, rare towers rose like smooth, windowless black spires, each capped by a small dome with a balcony underneath: the closest points to the sky.

So she set out for one, walking against the setting sun. When the tower loomed ahead of her, she found that it opened to an inner flight of winding stairs, always winding stairs, which she climbed, knees creaking under every step. From the growing cold of the black rock wall, she could tell that the sun outside had set early through her ascent, leaving her surrounded by foreign stars in a deep, primordial night.

Even then, she was not ready for the spectacle of the night. Atop the tower, Sarah Raphael leaned against the balcony and stared at the stars above and the House below. Locked in inscrutable geometric constellations, they bathed this world in a faint golden light, brushing against the curves of the roof, their junctions, the barren courtyards in between. She found then that this dark outline spoke to her intuition in a way that was clearer to her than the earlier hazeless sights. She saw the path she would take on the following day in her descent and followed fir what would be years, decades, knew the halls that awaited her until an end that was so far ahead she could only faintly sense it even in this moment of pitch-black lucidity, and could not say whether this end would be hers or one last archway giving into the bare ground.

For now, though, the hour was late and she was tired. She leaned back to rest in the lap of the statue that filled the lone plinth atop the tower, a sitting woman whose legs were made of wood, and left her solar-powered torchlight on the balcony, as a message and a guide to all who may tread the halls and look up, through the darkness.


End file.
